Above The Clouds

I played this again and didn't agree with what I thought earlier. So I changed my ratings and deleted my feedback. The first time I played, I was in school; I was quite stressed and my friend stood behind me and pointed out all the little problems. Of course, I try to avoid letting external or social factors influence my ratings, and I never thought it did. But it did. Congratulations for a wonderful game!

Also, I waited in 10 minutes for the elevator to come. But the countdown just turned negative. What an anticlimax.

Edit: No, I didn't save it.

A short but sweet game with amazing art and sound (as always!). I think you did a good job of completing it this time, it definitely feels like it goes from start -> middle -> end, so good job balancing your time better with this one and getting a complete game done!

As for the walljump... I did struggle with it! I don't think it's bad, I just think it's different. I personally am used to holding 'into' the wall before then pressing jump and the direction I want to go. So not having to do this, while fine, wasn't easy to get used to so I ended up falling off walls quite a lot. In the end I just mashed the buttons until I went up the walls, which seemed to work :D (I haven't read any other feedback so sorry if I'm just flogging a dead horse here on the wall jump).

I reeeeaally wish the lift did something too! I opened the game again after I finished it and let it count down and ... nothing. I was hoping it would just take you to the top and the father would call you lazy or something :P However that's not important gameplay wise, just thought it would be funny.

I think I got outside of the world somewhere near the top? You can see a lift behind a wall but you can climb up around it to a teleport point, which means it was probably the right way to go even though the lift is behind a wall? Might just have been lack of time with the level design but, whatever the case, it got me to the end :D

So no issues really apart from the wall jump struggle (but again, that's more a me issue than a game issue). Good job!

.... weird walljump heh? 👀

This honestly doesn't look or sound like a gamejam game, I think the biggest letdown for me was the level design. It's mostly fine but not that inspired, which means it isn't on par with the rest of the game. I still think the part where you get the double jump isn't that good though. That wall with the electricity è_é

Well done! I really enjoyed it. Art and music was very pleasant. I think it looked better inside the caves. When outside, everything seemed blockier. Maybe because the background was circles and the cloud tiles didn't mesh, but it was still nice.

The walljumping took a few moments to adapt to, but didn't give me too many problems. I know you already got a lot of feedback about this aspect, but I'll add that in my opinion, when it comes to player control, the fewer actions that are performed automatically, the better. I refer to the automatic wall sliding. It reduces player frustration (at least mine) when they don't have to rely on a mystery force to play part of their character for them, so when it doesn't happen the fault is on them for their slow reaction speed or mistimed input. You also don't want it to happen at an awkward time, like when you are just trying to jump up a normal staircase and end up sliding in them.

All around, great work!

The sound was really great, graphics were nice also. I managed to get out of bounds at the near end of the game, as it seemed the actual path instead the real way ^^" The walljumping, which many has talked about, I'll also give my word here, but without reading others comments :D First, here is video of me trying walljump (this is after getting first spot where you needed walljump): https://imgur.com/a/ctshVNt

My struggle was even worse at first spot, which took me ages :'D Later I got more hang of it, as I found what was wrong with my attempts.

I will explain my reason, why I struggled so hard. What I tried, was lean against the wall I am on to: I try move player against the wall before walljump. In your game, if you are next to wall, it automatically assumes walljumping position; no need to moving against the wall. This is not bad. The more important is what happens when you jump. When I jump, I might still be holding a bit longer button as to assume that I need to lean the wall to initiate walljump. And after jumping I would change my key to to another direction where I am trying to get to. This is short period of time, which assumes that you need lean/move to wall, to make a walljump. In this kind of walljump, there is usually small window where it will not anymore register you control towards the wall, when you kick off from it, just the possible movement away from it. Now, in your game there was no such window, so character would try immediatly move back towards to the wall after jump. I think assumption is, that player is not trying to go towards the wall, as it automatically is going to walljump.

So, I tried to move against the wall, jump and then almost immediatly change my direction key. This didn't work, as I would for short time move in wrong direction. How I eventually learnt to jump in your game was to let go everything and then press simultanously jump and direction of heading. So climbing up narrow tower was [up-right, hold until reach next wall] [let go both - be against wall] [up-left, hold until reach wall] and repeat. This is kind of rythmic and nice when climbing long narrow tower.

In my struggle video, I was not doing this yet, but I was struggling hard to not do how I instinctly was doing before. Maybe what I was doing in video, was trying lean against the wall, then let go, then press jump, and after jump try to move the head of direction. This was too slow, as you can see I start moving away from wall too slowly. The mental struggle ^^"

Overall game looked pretty and sound was great :) Sorry that it's the walljump controversy which surrounds game now ^^"

I'm blown away by how good this is. The sound design, the art, everything is amazing.

I'm going to go against the feedback most people have given regarding the wall jump: It's different than most platformers, sure, but once you get used to it it's fine. I think the elevator might be broken, it went straight past the first floor into the negatives :(

Having some way of moving the camera would have been nice as well.

Wish the game were longer, but within the time constraints of the jam and considering the quality of everything else it's understandable.

Overall really well done!

>"We can't finish games properly, but at least they look and sound lovely!"

Pretty accurate, although I would say this one was finished more properly than most. Loved the size of the world and the atmosphere, the sound effects really tied the world together and the art was clear and appealing. No real complaints, solid work!

I really like your entries for it's originality but this one was kind of lacking. I didn't like the controls, especially the walljump. And it felt like some artwork was rushed compared to the other art.

Idk, I played til the clouds, and I think the part before that was too long and didn't really grab my interest.

I did like the elevator 'joke' though.

Honestly your guy's games are always a highlight of these jam's for me, and this one was no exception.

I found the movement and jump height, to be nicely balanced for the level design. and the variable jump height was a nice touch for the feel of movement. that being said, the wall jumping was probably the biggest hurdle in my enjoyment of the platforming.

I could see what you where going for (or at lest I think I do ). making it so the player can switch input directions before jumping for better precision. the biggest issue I have with it is that it takes control away from the player. ones the slide began you have to jump or fall with no other options to cancel it. on top of that the slide will begin even if you hold in to the wall, making the double jump fail in to a slide if you try delaying the second jump on a wall. another issue is that the wall slide is inconsistent. I found many times where the player will not begin to slide making me unable to wall jump.

every thing else felt great, but the wall jump which was the core movement mechanic in the later game, held it back.

when it did work well on the other hand the amount of of control I had after the jump gave me plenty of options in the air which felt great.

i guess a decent fix to it would be to, make down cancel the slide in case you down want to, hold down to initiate the slide. and lastly a different animation if your holding away from the wall to better convey where your holding will change the after math of the jump.

but that is just the first few things that come to mind, anyways on the other end of the spectrum, the art and sound design was great. the clash of the bright visuals with the consent of a collapsing unmaintained tower gave the levels a nice charm. and the detail of the sound design, from the ambient piano to the hundreds of step sound gave me a great sense of immersion.

all the fine detail poured in to your respected areas of expertise really made me want to keep playing, in spite of any and all hick-ups I ran in to across the way.

the main ones being the wall-jumping, a few times I got stuck, and hitting R during cut-scenes and restarting the games.

anyways, I hope to see you guys improve and make more great experiences in the future!

I had a couple of minor technical hitches, but for a two person team, this was a surprisingly fleshed out game from an "amount of content" perspective.

It looks and sounds superb and controlled fluently, and I had a lot of fun with it. Great work!

Really liked it. Visually a very beautiful game, especially for a jam. Audio was also great. I think there might be a memory leak somewhere because my game kept slowing down, but because no one else had that problem I'm going to assume it's because my laptop is trash. The wall jump is like a normal wall jump, but I think it doesn't have to control like others, it works and I think it's a unique way of doing it.

An audio-visual delight, obviously. The sound really is way better than it needs to be, lol. Walljumping did need some getting used to, but other than that, not much to complain about here.

Sincerely, Current WR holder 😎

Nice game! I had a lot of problems in the first room with double jumps, when I would accidentally waste my double jump after failing a wall jump. I did figure out that you can climb up the side of a wall with great difficulty using short jumps and skipped a tough wall jump. In any case, I'd love to see the kinks worked out in the wall jump since the gameplay was good otherwise. It's very polished, especially the sound & music!

Amazing game. Congratulations. Only the wall jump is a bit hard for the controls.

This game seems veery polished! A bit longer and with some more features or enemies and I could easily see this sold on itch or something.

Sound design is just great, may I ask what program/tools you used to achieve this?

Art and animation look, again, very polished and just cool, reminds me a bit of Momodora, which I absolutely loved.

My only real complaint is the wall jump. I don't think it's "bad", it's just different than it usally is done in these kinds of games, so it took some getting used to after a few frustrating falls, lol.

But overall, the game handles very nice and, most importantly, was fun to play! Also, the elevator is a lie...

There were a couple small parts where the camera made it hard to see where I was going, but the art and audio were very nice. Controls felt pretty good -- though it took me a bit to get used to the wall jumping for some reason -- even though I knew how it worked.

What did you use as your physics engine? it felt pretty tight and handled edges well (I also appreciated the coyote time)

Team push your dad off the ledge represent!

Real nice game! Walljump controls were hard to get used to, but I figured it out eventually. Only real complaint is that pressing R restarts the entire game. I got to the dad and then pressed R instead of E...